After the major
critical and financial success of Sling
Blade, Billy Bob Thornton’s filmmaking debut, he paired with Miramax and
the Weinstein brothers to make his sophomore feature, All the Pretty Horses. That experience was such a debacle that it
took Thornton
over a decade to return to the role of writer/director, with infamous stories
of Weinstein control being the reason for the film’s failure. Jayne Mansfield’s Car has some
spectacular moments, most of which Thornton
gives to himself, but it could have used a little more focus and direction.
There must be a happy medium between the Weinstein’s way and Thornton’s tendency to over-indulge, but it
was not found in this film.

The story
follows the unlikely pairing of two families in a wholly unique situation.
These narratives are very often found in wedding films, when two different
families are forced to endure and appreciate the nature of someone else’s ways.
Jayne Mansfield’s Car instead uses a
funeral, and the two families have specific reasons to have never met before.
Jim Caldwell (Robert Duvall) is the patriarch to a large southern family living
in Alabama in
1969 when he receives word that his ex-wife has died. Having left him for a new
family in England
married to Kingsley Bedford (John Hurt), Jim never remarried and hasn’t fully
recovered from the loss. When he hears that his ex-wife’s request was to be
buried in Alabama,
Jim grudgingly invites her new family into his home for the funeral.

There are so
many ways to attack this film, I have to stop for a second and choose which is
first. I could take the obvious digs at casting for putting an atrocious role
model like Chris Brown in this film, but that’s a little too obvious. I could
point out that this movie is a blatant pop-culture scheme to make B-Boys
popular again, though the commercial coating over every idea in the movie makes
it feel endlessly contrived. There is the strange choice to have the dance sequences
with mismatched music, if any at all. There is the awful acting amidst a
terrible script filled with training sequences and contrived moments of
coaching from “Lost” star Josh Holloway. The complaints I have with this film
are endless, and there is only one thing within it that deserves even a modicum
of praise.

This is
obviously not the type of film people go to see because of the acting or the
story. We know that there are only two possible outcomes to the film, and one
is less likely than the other. This movie is not about plot, story or acting.
The only thing that this film is about is B-Boy dancing, and it has some
impressive sequences of that. The biggest problem is that the most impressive
moments occur near the end of the film, making the first hour a test of
endurance. The most difficult part to endure was watching Chris Brown’s face
every moment but the one in which it gets punched by a teammate.